The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

This week we will be covering a topic not often discussed on Whiteboard Friday. We are going to be talking about negative SEO tactics and how these practices function. Negative SEO is definitely not something we condone here at SEOmoz but education around these techniques can be a helpful, precautionary method that could prevent you from being the subject of malicious intent.

We hope you enjoy the video and don't forget to leave your comments below.

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about a very concerning and controversial topic - negative SEO. Now, negative SEO has a number of meanings. I want to walk through them and get to some points. If you've been paying attention to the Twitter-sphere or the SEO blogosphere over the past week, two weeks, there's been a lot of discussion around negative SEO, particularly backlink pointing to bring down sites. I will get to that, but first I want to start with some of the classic ways that negative SEO could potentially hurt you.

The idea behind negative SEO is that rather than doing good, positive things that will promote signals in the search engines that bump up your rankings, there are ways to do bad, terrible, negative things. Now, obviously you could do these on your own sites, but hopefully you're smart enough not to do that. There may be things that other site owners, webmasters, marketers, or black hat SEO's, mostly we're talking about black hat SEO's, spammers, and even people doing very illegal things to bring down your website in the rankings or to even take your website offline.

There are classic types of things, like malware, hacks, and injections. So this is the first one I'm going to talk about. Basically, what we're saying here is that you've got your site, it has some pages on here, and hackers may find security vulnerabilities in your site, in your FTP logins. It may be a WordPress install. Earlier this year I had a hacker essentially come in and inject spam and malware onto my personal blog at RandFishkin.com/blog. The idea is that they all inject spam, links to spam sometimes, sometimes very subtly. They will make changes to your site. One of the classic examples of this is someone going and editing your robots.txt file to block Google bot or to restrict all IPs from a certain range, or those kinds of things. Obviously, that's going to take your site out of the search engines. Or inject viruses or malware that will install itself on computers that visit you.

Unfortunately, I was actually visiting MozCation.com, which Gianluca Fiorell, one of our Pro members from Spain - he's Italian but from Spain - had set up last year to promote MozCation in Barcelona, in Spain. Unfortunately, it looked like some spammers had injected some malware on that site, and it had been on there a little while. I think he's taken care of it now, but these are the types of problems. What you'll see is a download will go into your cache, and sometimes Microsoft Security Essentials will alert you that that's happened, hopefully if you've got it installed. So this is something to watch out for. You want to close those security holes.

The other kinds of things to watch out for is spam reporting. Sometimes a lot of people, unfortunately, in the SEO-sphere still do manipulative kinds of link building. Obviously, most of the people who watch Whiteboard Friday are not in that group, but some of you probably are. Maybe you buy a few directory listings. You go on Fiverr and you buy some cheap links. You find some spam through some forums that potentially works. You're doing sorts of things that are on the grey hat/black hat borderline, in terms of link acquisition, and sometimes you will see that your competitors might spam report you. So this guy's going to go over to Google and maybe he'll leave a threat at the webmaster forums, or he'll send it through a spam report in his Google Webmaster Tools. A lot of this spam reporting, I think they said they get tens of thousands of spam reports each month, I believe it was. Actually, fewer than I'd expect, but a lot of people do report spam to Google. These might be your competitors. These might be other webmasters. They could just be random people on the Internet who are like, "Why isn't this site ranking here?. This looks terrible. I don't like this."

When this happens, Google might take a closer look at your backlinks, and obviously this might bring you down. There are arguments about the ethics inside the search engine industry. Personally, I think that removing low quality crap from the Internet is all of our jobs, and I like to be part of that. I think that it's a good thing to make the Internet a better place, and if you're not making the Internet a better place, I hope that you're not doing web marketing because it makes the rest of our industry look bad.

However, certainly reasonable minds can disagree. Aaron Wall, from SEO Book, who I highly respect, who I grew up with in this industry and think the world of, takes a complete opposite view. He thinks that because I support disclosing spam and manipulation to Google and to search engines that this makes me a bad person. That's too bad. That's frustrating, but I think reasonable people can disagree. Certainly whatever angle you are on, on this, you should at least be aware that this stuff happens and know that it's a potential risk, particularly if you're doing highly manipulative things.

The last one I want to talk about is actually the biggest one and probably the most important and the most salient and relevant to what we've been talking about today. That is pointing nasty links to your website. Now this has been something that a lot of webmasters have been discussing actively over the last couple of weeks in this sphere, essentially kicked off by a forum thread on Traffic Power Forum. I haven't previously spent a lot of time there, but it's a very active forum populated by a wide mix of white hat folks, grey hat folks, some pretty dark black hat folks, which I'll show you in a minute.

Two members there, Jammie and Pixelgrinder, hit two different websites. One is called SEOFastStart.com, that's owned by Dan Thies. Dan, of course, early keyword research guru in the SEO space, big industry mover and shaker. Spoke at a lot of the early search engine strategies conferences. I've met him a number of times, really good guy, solid guy. He complimented Matt Cutts, the Google Webspam Chief, on the search quality team. He complimented him over Twitter on knocking out some spam. Some people on the forum felt that it was, I don't know, in poor taste. Right? Essentially they felt that because he was being complimentary to Google for kicking out webspam, that he should then be the target of this negative SEO. The other site was NegativeSEO.me, which was essentially a website offering services to get someone banned from the search indices, and this a little concerning in and of itself.

Now the thing that's interesting about these sites, and Dan admitted this about SEOFastStart. Not a very big site. Right? Not a lot of great brand or link signals. Potentially some small amounts of not wholly white hat types of activities already happening around these sites. So we're not talking about (a) big brand sites, or (b) sites that have no idea about the SEO world and aren't doing anything manipulative and are clean as the driven snow. These are a little off that track. These were both hit by these guys, at least presumably, according to the forum thread, and lost a lot of their rankings.

When I say hit, what I mean is this type of thing happens. So here's your site.com up here. Right? Essentially, what's going on is you've got some nice white hat, editorially given, earned links, high quality stuff, and that's great. Then there's some kind of this dark cloud of black hattery, spammy, manipulative posts. They talked about a number of things, XRumer blasts, buying links on Fiverr, buying links from some link networks, pointing some links that they had seen get hit on other sites at this site, and essentially trigger this loss of rankings. Now, they didn't get banned from the index, but they fell from, I think Dan Thies' site in particular fell from ranking #1, for his personal name, to number30, 35, somewhere around there, and hits like that similar across both these sites.

The second example was another forum thread started by a user with the user name, Negative SEO, and that was for the domain JustGoodCars.com. Now again, Just Good Cars unfortunately looks like they were doing a little bit of things that might be construed as manipulative, even prior to this attack on them by the Negative SEO guy. Some links that were of questionable sources or how they were acquired, and then a big network of websites that were all pointing back and forth to each other from many different pages on these many different sites. This guy took it upon himself to say, well they were . . . I guess this website had been complaining in the Google webmaster forums about some other sites outranking them, so this person took it upon themselves to do some pretty nasty, evil stuff.

Now I can't support this in any way. I'm frustrated that unfortunately this is a part of our world. But you should be aware of it, because what they did was creative, almost to the point of ingenuity, but definitely dark and evil, maybe even bordering on illegal depending on the legalities. I'm not really sure. Here's what they said they did. Of course, I can't prove that they actually did these things, but here's what they said they did. So they did go do a lot of manipulative, nasty backlinking to the site from a lot of those sources we talked about. They mentioned a few XRumer blasts. They posted a lot of duplicate content. They set up fake WordPress splogs, essentially a spam blog, and then they re-posted the content that existed on JustGoodCars.com on tens of thousands of pages across the Web so that Google might say, "Oh, well why is this duplicate content?" I don't know that that's actually highly concerning in and of itself. A lot of people copy content from all over the Web for both good and bad reasons.

Then they did something that's really nasty. They went to Fiverr and they asked for people to post fake reviews to Google Reviews to make it look like Just Good Cars was manipulating Google Reviews, and actually got them thrown out of that program. According to the forum post, anyway, that's what happened. They got their stars and their Google Reviews and their ratings removed, and all that kind of stuff, which that's whew, that's really low. That sucks if that's what really happened.

It's even more terrifying, but they sent fake emails. They set up email addresses that looked like they came from Just Good Cars, and sent fake emails to websites that had posted good editorial, positive links, saying, "Hey, you should stop linking to this site. There are these problems with it. We're requesting a DMCA take down action against it. Our attorneys will be in touch if you don't remove your links." Those kinds of things. So really just, oh man, that's really evil. But stuff that we definitely need to be aware of in terms of the world of negative SEO and what this kind of stuff can happen.

Now, it's very tough to verify anonymous users on an anonymous forum posting and whether all of this stuff actually happened, but certainly the ideas behind it are very concerning. What I want to express today is that there are some things you can do on your site that will make you higher risk and lower risk to these kinds of things.

Higher risk is going to be, like some of these other sites, you've already done a little bit of manipulative linking. Right? You've already done some spammy stuff. You have manipulative on-site stuff. Meaning for example, like Just Good Cars there's kind of that footer with all these links pointing to all these other places. This was mentioned in the forum thread. So I'm not giving away new information here, but there's stuff on this site that looks like it might be not wholly kosher, not wholly white hat.

Your site has few high quality brand signals. High quality brand signals, things like lots of people searching for your domain name and brand name. Lots of mentions of you in the news and press, in outlets that are high quality. Lots of offline sorts of signals. Lots of user and usage metrics types of signals. Lots of verification kinds of things. Using high quality providers of everything from the IP address, where your website's hosted, to the domain registration link, to the services you might have installed on your site, Akamai or any of the CDN networks suggest you're very popular. Any type of signal like this that looks like a highly brand intense signal.

Lower risk is going to be the opposite. Right? So things like a totally clean backlink profile. Never done any kind of manipulative linking, at least not intentional outbound backlink building. Don't forget, everyone's going to have some spam links. Even if you've never done any manipulative backlinking or any backlinking or marketing of any kind, you will have some bad backlinks, because the Web, just there are all sorts of weird crawlers and bots that host links all over the place. It's fine. Don't sweat those. It's the normal volume. Things like having a beautiful, elegant, high quality UX. A great UX is a fantastic defense against a lot of spam and manipulation. It's even a great tactic for folks who are trying to do SEO. It's just a great signal in general. Right? Having a great UX is going to get you more conversions and more people using your site. Anyone who is browsing your website, say, from the Google Search Quality team or the webspam team, or the Google reviewers, which Google hires, or from Bing, any of those folks who are looking at your site are going to say, "Oh this is clearly a great site. We want to have this in our index."

If you review some of these other sites, you can take them or leave them. One that does not feel very SEO. I think you all know what I mean. There's sort of that sixth sense of, boy, they're doing a lot of things on the page and off the site that don't feel like they're natural, don't feel like they're for users. Whenever you have that sixth sense around a site, that's going to put you in a higher danger category. Not doing that, having that very natural sort of site, you can target keywords, do a good job with your titles, do a good job with your content, do a good job with your internal linking, but make it feel very natural. I'll give you good examples. Amazon, very well SEO'ed, but doesn't feel SEO'ed. Zappos, doesn't feel SEO'ed. Even SEOmoz, it doesn't feel very SEO'ed, but it's doing a good job. TechCrunch, doesn't feel SEO'ed, but ranks phenomenally well.

Finally, having those strong brand signals, the branded searches, lots of people searching for your brand name specifically. Good links, good mentions, good press, good user and usage metrics, all these types of things are going to protect you from a lot of these types of spam attacks.

That being said, there's nasty stuff that other people can do. So you want to (a) keep your eyes wide open. Make sure you're registered with Google Webmaster Tools so you can get any of these warnings ahead of time. If you happen to see an influx of really nasty looking links, you might want to send a preemptive reconsideration request to Google saying, "Hey, we don't know where these came from and we have nothing to do with this. We just want you guys to know that this is not our activity. Please feel free to disregard or not count these links." 99% of the time Google is not going to say, "Oh these bad links that are pointing to you, we're going to count those as reducing your SEO and bringing you down in the rankings." They're instead going to say, "Oh well, we're going to ignore these. We're going to remove the value that these pass." They're not going to pass PageRank or anchor text value or link trust, or whatever it is. We're just going to count the good stuff.

I remember being in a session, this was years ago, probably five or six years ago, with Matt Cutts, the head of webspam for Google. He was looking at a site on his computer, and the person asked about their website from the audience, and he said, I see, I don't remember what it was, 14,000 odd links pointing to this site, but Google's actually only counting about 30 of them. That's why you're not ranking very well. Most of those links we've removed all the value that they pass. So it's not that they were having those bad links hurt the site. It's just that they're saying, "Oh these are not going to pass any more link value."

Now, what I would suggest here is, if you see stuff that looks like manipulative and negative SEO, you just be careful. We are trying to do some things here at SEOmoz to help with this. One of the things our data scientist, Dr. Matt Peters, is working with some folks here at Moz to build a large list of spam so we can do some classification, and eventually inside the Mozcape index, which will appear in Open Site Explorer, show up in your Pro-web app, show up in the Mozbar, we'll try and classify sites to say, "Hey we're pretty sure this is spam. This looks like the kind of thing where we've pattern matched and seen Google penalize or ban a lot of these sites." We're also trying to build some metrics to show what are really good, high quality, and editorially given sites. So domain authority and page authority already exist to try and do that.

Then, we're also running some experiments where I've offered up my personal blog, which is a relatively small site, probably has as few links as any of these, probably fewer than Just Good Cars, RandFishkin.com, to see if some of these nasty folks, who are hitting and taking down sites with negative SEO, would like to concentrate their focus on my sites. For two reasons, number one, we'd be very curious to see it happen, and number two, we can certainly afford the hit. We offered up SEOmoz as well. Most people seem to think that SEOmoz is not a good target. It won't actually be taken down.

We're going to run some experiments internally as well on this front and hopefully be able to disprove that negative SEO is a common thing that works very well. I'd hate to see an industry spring up like this. I think that this type of activity, particularly some of these really nasty things, are just an awful part of being around the black hat spam-sphere. I hope that it's something that we can defend against. I hope you'll join me in contributing. I look forward to your comments. If you've seen stuff like this before, please do feel free to talk about it either anonymously or openly in the comments. I will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Although this video contains a dangerous innacuracy that might mislead people to panic and fear, Rand has done a great job of illustrating what the more significant threats are, and they have nothing to do with people linking to you. There are many ways to attack a web site that actually do cause actual harm.

In the case of my site, the only SERP that moved *down* was [seo book]. The reasons why it moved have nothing to do with "negative SEO," and everything to do with changes that I made to the site.

They're talking also about driving my rankings for [seo] down, but that SERP was only "down" from the higher rankings that the link burst created initially.

If I hand you a donut and you get one good bite in before I take the donut away, I didn't "steal your donut." What really happened was that you got a free bite of a donut.

I have access to my site's Analytics, and I know how SERPs move when I make specific types of changes, because I make changes all the time to see what will happen. For anyone who says "I know negative SEO works because I have done it to myself," consider whether you may be assigning causes to effects without sufficient data.

We have learned some interesting things in this process. Once I'm done playing whack-a-mole on the hype surrounding this issue, and we complete some other tests, I'll publish what we've found. Maybe I'll even fire up that Youmoz thingy.

The Wayback Machine is available to everyone, so you can see how the site was changed. I'm not in any rush to try to "win back" <10 referrals a week, but we will address the navigation issues on the site when we have time. We only just got the important stuff running properly yesterday. Danny Sullivan will be publishing more on this shortly, presumably at Search Engine Land.

"...I think that removing low quality crap from the Internet is all of our jobs"

I so agree with this I've sprained my thumb up.

Imagine just for a moment on Twitter, that no one reported spam when hit with a spammy follower, sure Twitter might eventually eliminate it algorithmically, however when the community cooperates with manual reporting of it, that not only helps accelerate elimination of that spam, over time it allows improvement to auto detection adn elimination of it. Everyone wins. Ask not what your serp can do for you - ask what you can do for your serp.

Few updates about the Mozcation.com malware issue Rand cited at the beginning of the post:

Working on it (even though not really a top priority, as the site is substantially abandoned);

Actually Rand himself was the one who adviced me of the malware issue, as Google never sent a malware alert (to tell the truth, in GWT>Diagnostics>Malware it says "Google has not detected any malware on this site."), neither my hosting company (which is quite fast in advising these cases).

So... trying to see if it real malware or a false positive.

Said that, and about the WBF, let's be precise and do not call SEO what is simply "Criminal" (and forensic SEO is all about this, or am I wrong?).

Personally, even if I don't agree with the practical consequences of what they do, I've big respect for many who have explored the BH side of SEO, as they have an incredible high technical knowledge and because they experiment of the edge. But Negative SEO? I think that even many of those BH guys I respect would think it's a very coward way of making business.

Great overall coverage of negative seo Rand but you forgot one other tactic that I've personally seen used, 301 redirects. About a month ago I noticed one of my sites completely tank for no reason which is odd because it's a 10 year old domain with many natural editorial and authoritative from very credible link sources (wikipedia, cnn, ucla, etc). A friend suggested to take a look at my current backlinks and pulled up an ahrefs.com report for me and I noticed that there was a redirect from a spammy looking domain that I didn't own. When I visited the site it performed a 301 redirect over to my site so I did a whois lookup and emailed the owner asking why they had redirected their domain to my site, they responded a few days later saying that they were targetting a keyword that my site ranked for but had been penalized for forum profile link building a few weeks earlier and didn't want to spend the time to rebuild the site but didn't want their domain to be a complete waste so they redirected it over to me. I asked them if they could remove the redirect and they said sure no problem, a few days later my site bounces back up as if nothing had ever happened:
http://i.imgur.com/YFJbS.png
I wish I could show 60 days data but my SERP tracker has a 30 day cutoff.
I noticed that you recently had an issue with seomoz getting unrelated 301 redirects which caused you to rank for dog snuggie related keywords. If 301 redirects are capable of passing rankings then it's reasonable to assume that they can also pass penalties right? A quick search on google for this search term:
"301 redirect" "penalized"
Returns many forum and blog posts about people who used a 301 redirect from a penalized domain to their new domains and while some saw a temporary ranking increase for the new domain eventually they were usually slapped back down to the same level as the penalized domain within a matter of days.
If a competing site was to go down due to their own link building activities, whats to stop them from taking an innocent site down with them? I could also see something like this being used as somewhat of an extortion tool, in my case the webmaster used and removed the 301 redirect in good faith but he could have just as easily demanded money for it to be removed.
He could have even taken it a step further and used the 301 redirect against a local small business who knows absolutely nothing about SEO and then swoop in saying he can fix it for $1,000 per month with no upfront payment and actually come out looking like a hero to them.
I hope google comes out and makes a clear and concise statement regarding negative SEO because since watching this WBF (great job btw) I've spent a couple of hours researching negative SEO and based on the discussions you linked to over at trafficplanet.com and some I discovered at blackhatworld the general consensus among blackhats is that negative SEO has been around for years but in the past few months it has become much, much easier to do.
To these blackhatters the logic is very simple, if Matt Cutts and google has repeatedly stated in many blog posts, conferences, and youtube videos that you should only obtain clean and natural links so that you don't GET a penalty why wouldn't it be possible to build dirty and unnatural links to your competition so that you can GIVE them a penalty?
You linked to fiverr which I kind of wish you hadn't because after seeing how easily people can buy 10,000 or 20,000 junk backlinks with just a few mouse clicks and $5 I feel like I'm going to have to jump back into OSE and watch my link numbers on a daily basis in order to avoid the potential of any negative SEO.
Kudos to you for putting this information out there Rand, this topic may be ugly and unpopular but I guess every SEO needs to know what the potential risks are and what can be done to avoid them.

I don't know why its so difficult to believe Negative SEO works when many of us have tanked our own sites or atleast inner pages on our sites while trying to build links. If you are in competitive niches odds are you've pressed too hard on occasion and taken a penalty for it or got filtered.

If you can do it to yourself, you can definitely do it to someone else.

Many times people think they tank their sites, yet the sites simply fall back to where they should have been all along had they never had the bad links to begin with (which worked for 2-3 months and then got devalued).

With regards to the Dan Thies example of him losing rank for his own name, this may be a result of natural rank changes and not negative SEO. Suddenly lots of websites are talking about him by name so it's natural that the rankings for his name would change.

Totally. Dan himself argued in several spots that verifying what caused the rankings drop is nearly impossible. I've still not seen a truly compelling example of a 100% white hat site with decent brand signals dropping in rankings due to spammers pointing bad links at them. I've seen dozens of forum threads and few blog posts arguing that this can be done, but these three examples I mentioned above are some of the only publicly disclosed domains, and it's still difficult to say whether the negative SEO was definitively the catalyst.

thanks for the links to the threads. I wanted to read the whole thing regarding the Google reviews. I have seen that car dealerships routinely post fake reviews and it's so blatantly obvious because all 100 of their 5 star reviewers are reviewing the same 5 or 6 companies, and usually these companies are all in different states! I had a run in w/ a car dealer and they claimed my complaint was invalid because "we are the highest rated dealership on Google." so I checked and found things like this. check out the reviews. All 5 stars (not naturally typical of a car dealership anyway. I created a blog about it, reported it to Google, and some of the dealerships in the LHM auto group stopped doing it. One still is doing it. But Google hasn't done anything to address it.

sooo...long story short, fake Google reviews probably aren't going to get you banned or penalized. This dealership has 90+ fake google reviews (they told me they hired a company called reviewboost.com to do it) and hasn't even been affected.

If Dan hasn't already done so it would probably be a good idea to create a Google+ profile and link to it from the website using rel=author/rel=publisher! (and of course link the G+ profile to the website for two way verification)

Not just "maybe" Steve - you're 100% right about the cause and effect... see my comments below, but it's not even arguable.

The #1 result for my name has been the same since 2007. It never moved down. In spite of what Rand says in the video, I never lost rankings for my name. That *would* be scary but it didn't happen. Rand just whiffed on that one, in the midst of illustrating several real-and-not-hypothetical threats.

Again, see my comment below for more info:http://www.seomoz.org/blog/negative-seo-myths-realities-and-precautions-whiteboard-friday#jtc178294

Can nobody here see the implications of this? This means when you get to the top someone will just fire a load of scrapebox & xrumer links at you and when you are at number 3 someone will just do it to the one at number 1. Businesses don't care how you got a website to number 1 they just want to see results. Try explaining xrumer and scrapebox backlinking to a guy that sells digital printers. You will be met with a blank expression and then told you are fired because his website has tanked.

And as for sending requests to Google to get someone to manually look at your backlink profile - how many staff do you think they employ to do this at Google? Enough to look at joesmo's request because his blue widget website has tanked? Probably about 30 people. Do they have a financial interest in joesmos website selling widgets? No. What they care about are their adwords profits and this is the final nail in the coffin for SEO, trying to set the industry up against each other so that people move away from SEO and move onto buying adwords.

Also the very fact that big brands are immune from this sort of attack; i.e. they would have to be as otherwise anarachists could remove banks from the SERPs with spammy backlink blasts, just shows that Google pretty much staple large brands to the top of the SERPs for competitive keywords and it is almost pointless trying to move them. They're the guys that spend the big bucks on adwords, so they're the guys who get to stay at the top. There's a two tier algorithmn one for big brands and one for the nobrands.

I dont understand something here. There are many SEOs who hate Google and are completly against everything they do (IMO make the world a more digitally friendly place) and yet here they are trying to learn about how their SERP works. If you hate Google why use them.

Google is a business they are here to make money just like yourself.

IMO Google wants to give the most userr friendly results so that they can keep their billions of users happy.

A few thing google has done for you...

Saved many peoples lives with health issues that they are afraid of sharing (free)

I don't hate Google at all. I think their company is great, I use it's email, browser, translate the list goes on. What I am offering is an explanation as the implications of negative SEO and how the SEO industry will be affected by this. I don't think they have the time, nor inclination, or financial interest to deal manually with the millions of websites that could be subject to negative SEO.

Basically Google don't want people spending money on SEO, they want people to spend money on adwords. SEOs are taking a part of the market share away from adwords revenue and they don't like it. Whether you understand it or not, as an SEO, you are competiting with Google for their PPC market share.

Nice! im glad you can appriciate Google. Unfortunetly, there are many others that don't.

"I don't think they have the time, nor inclination, or financial interest to deal manually with the millions of websites that could be subject to negative SEO."

They have the time, funding, and staff, to do just about anything they want. They only need to worry about legalities. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7yfV6RzE30&feature=youtu.be

I use to believe this myself.

"Basically Google don't want people spending money on SEO, they want people to spend money on adwords. SEOs are taking a part of the market share away from adwords revenue and they don't like it. Whether you understand it or not, as an SEO, you are competiting with Google for their PPC market share."

Google does not need the extra buck! not if it can sacrafice the empire they have built. Google has competition too. If Google was really giving such terribale results people will look else where.

first of all I want to make clear that I'm not an anti Google freak, but... your 8 points seem too much an eulogy to Google IMHO.

I've not really understood your first point. But, even though that may be true in many cases, in many others it makes quite dangerous confusion. Just recently I've read a post about how - probably due to type in detection - Google was confusing lactose intolerance with milk allergy, which are different kind of disease related to milk and with two different diagnostics;

Gmail... free, with ads and with a somehow ambiguous privacy policy;

Google docs... see Gmail;

Simplified searching... which translated means favoriting its own properties. All the antitrust problems Google have are due to that "simpliefied searching"

Mobile Integration. If I am not wrong, it is not the only one.

YouTube. See Gmail on steroid (ads)

My job, SEO... SEO was existing before Google and would exist even if Google would have not been invented.

As you say, Google is a business.

Ah, about user friendly SERPs, please check position 6 of this search and click on the snippet. If that result is user friendly... but this post is not about the Penguin fail.

Yin and Yang my friend. The car you drive kills people. Why don’t we talk about how evil cars are? Car dealers are out to make money, a car dealer can be a great friend of yours and he will stab you in the back (happened to me recently). Cars are bad for the environment and they cause wars or we can say cars are great, and they play music for us on our way to the mall.

My point is not that Google is perfect. My point is they are working towards a better SERP. Your example is exactly what they don’t want.

Do you truly believe that Google placed that result as in your example to stop SEO and encourage PPC? Do you think they need the extra money?

1-6 are tools people use in their daily lives. If they don’t like these tools, they don’t have to use them.

7. Currently Google is the best search engine to use. I don’t see any threads about Bing changing algorithms anywhere... IMHO for this thread Google is paying most of our bills. In fact, most of us use Google for our jobs or to find our jobs. The list goes on.

Do you truly believe that Google placed that result as in your example to stop SEO and encourage PPC?

No, I'm saying that that result is the consequence of an Update that seems not working that well as they expected... and that it shows the fact that maybe a 100% user friendly SERPs, as you define them, are not possible just with algorithmical updates.

1-6 are tools people use in their daily lives. If they don’t like these tools, they don’t have to use them.

Free Will is my credo. I was only contesting the fact that they are free. They are apparently free, as commercial TV is apparently free. It was a matter of being precise.

Currently Google is the best search engine to use. I don’t see any threads about Bing changing algorithms anywhere...

Currently Blekko and DuckDuckGo are better than Google. Google was the best one, and now is just the most used, that's why we always talk about it. And what I was saying is that even if Google wasn't invented, we were now talking and doing SEO.

"Currently Blekko and DuckDuckGo are better than Google. Google was the best one, and now is just the most used, that's why we always talk about it. And what I was saying is that even if Google wasn't invented, we were now talking and doing SEO."

I never heard of Blekko or DuckDuckGo and I am sure not many people have. This means they have not had to make big decisions yet. No matter what Google does, there will always be winners and losers. Google is always in the spot light. To say that Google has more users is inaccurate. Google has most of them! And Google wants to keep them. They don’t want their users to see results as shown in your example.

Why is Blekko and DuckDuckGo better? if your answer is they have a cleaner SERP, my response is they don’t have enough users. Its people that pollute Google SERP with spam and crap. Google is working at fixing these issues. However, in every war there are casualties.

Lol how so? I read what you wrote. I just don't see how you can compare a search engine like Google to any other search engine. Especially one with less then a % of the traffic. My question is what makes those search engines better? That's all. Sorry if a came off argent.

I agree with most of this. However why don’t you think volume counts? Anything Google does will get some people pissed and some people happy. We know there are spammers out there that are making Google’s SERP more challenging because they want to be seen on Google’s SERP.

I am not expert on these new search engines, so I will ask you. In your opinion do these new search engines have spammers or people working on manipulating results? Do they have negative SEOs?

Just an educated guess, but I get the felling they are not dealing with the issues Google is. If I was going to invest my time hurting someone’s ranking to benefit my own site, I would do it where I can benefit the most. In this case Google is where I can benefit the most, because Google has majority of the traffic.

I am not saying that Google is the best place for information (Quality). I also understand that many demographics can be found outside of Google.

I am saying that Google has most of the users (Quantity). Most users want their sites to be seen by as many people as possible, AKA Google.

Because Google has the most users, to me it makes sense that they get all the spam and negativity. Why would a black hat SEO go out of his way to harm a site in a search engine that has little volume when he can target a much bigger one?

IMO google has to constintly make changes because of what users are doing (abusing policy). The result of these changes influences everyone, the good and the bad. This whole negative SEO thing really sucks!

Well, that was kinda interesting. But, with all due respect, your response to the huge market for negative SEO Google will create with these penalties is to keep an eye on your WMT and submit a preemptive reconsideration request if you see anybody messing with you? Seriously?

Another thing you might have mentioned is that multitudes of people who played by Google's rules and never actively built links have been completely hosed by this update. We're talking out-of-business hosed.

And, how exactly do you know Google's going to "ignore 99% of spam links anyway?" Because of something Matt Cutts said in a talk years ago? Clearly, Penguin is a new paradigm. Not sure how that applies.

Oh, and you might also have mentioned how much the new SERPS suck now for so many searches. That seems relevant. That's because lots of quality sites actively built links, at the same time they actively worked on the quality of their sites. For some, those two things go hand in hand, despite Google's sanctimonious proclamations to the contrary.

So, now we get:

1) Crappy article on eHow.com

2) Crappy article on instructables.com

3) Crappy article on wikihow.com

4) Crappy video on youTube

5) Oh look, another crappy article on eHow.com

All old, out of date, and crappy. But hey, at least they don't have any evil "spam" links built to them.

I didn't want to comment, because I love SEOmoz, but how can anyone support what Google is doing after that?

Not "what" actually, but HOW

It's because of all sorts of FUD they are spreading about the links and SEO, people may be so vulnerable. yes, big brands are safe, but how about less powerful / stable sites? I haven't done any tests and I am not sure how effective negative SEO can be, but people are already scared - which is for sure a bad outcome.

Is it really necessary to scare site owners with their update announcements to death? If Google is already so smart that it can figure all sorts of link schemes, can't they just quietly discount those links - and stop there?

Now, back to the reason I didn't want to comment: I know this is a bit offtopic here. But that's why I actually don't support link scheme outing and blogging about frightening Google updates: most absolutely innocent people are scared to death because of these. That results in lots of FUD in SEO which I can't stand.

Ann, I see smaller niche sites as basically open game for negative SEO practices! I'm not encourgaging the use of this as a tatic but just accepting it's there and you have to watch for it. I see FUD as the perfect marketing vehichle as Google uses less resources to scare people than it would take to resolve the issue of being able to discount bad/negative inbound links.

I'm sure one of the other reasons is that it would fundamentally shift their entire ranking alogrithms and shift SEO out of their hands and into webmasters hands.....

Ann - I'm glad you commented! Different opinions are a great thing (you can see dozens just in this thread) and we really welcome them, particularly when they're presented in such a positive way.

I agree with you that if negative SEO works (which, as I noted in this video, I don't believe it does in most cases, particularly when it's purely links), then reporting spam to Google on your neighbors who may be innocent is a bad thing to do. However, apart from the likely illegal sabotage-style attacks mentioned in the third example, I've yet to see this actually working. There's no good, open examples of a totally white hat site that's never engaged in anything manipulative being brought down simply through spam links.

That's another reason I offered up SEOmoz and my personal blog (which, BTW, has ~40K new ugly looking links as of this week and still ranks fine for all the queries it used to) for the experiment.

I am not sure if Negative SEO works and I'll let you guys do the experiments, because I for one don't even know where to start. If anyone ever has any proofs or at least case studies, I hope SEOmoz will let us know.

My main frustration is the FUD that spreads the web like crazy nowadays.

The whole negative SEO story (I mean this one, not Negative SEO in general) started (I guess) with Dan's tweet to Matt Cutts on how great Google is making the search results cleaner. Then you comment on SEObook post about that saying that you support Google in their fight with spam.

So my question is: "can you really support what Google is doing?" Scaring website owners to death?

Something which has happened to me just today: one of MyBlogGuest blog owners emailed me saying that she has to remove the author's guest article because she is sure the guy is banned on Google and she doesn't want to link to "bad neighborhood". I looked at the article (which was pretty good), then at the linked site and found no signs of a ban (the site is quite new but it's indexed and cached. It only has a few links and it is clearly not aggressive in self-linking). So I am asking the lady, why she thinks the site is banned.

She replies that she has read the article on Google's blog about that so called "over-optimization" penalty they were warning about, got scared and thought she should check who she links to (which in itself is quite a smart decision). But how can a regular non-SEO-geeky webmaster tell if he/she links to bad neighborhood?

She makes an exact search in Google for some long phrase from the linked site, finds nothing and immediately assumes the guy is banned on G...

Another story: Another website owner thought one of the sites he linked to was banned simply because it has a Google PR of 0!

My point of all the whole long story is: With Google threatening us with something "dangerous" looming in the horizon, then its official article of that scary update everyone had already been scared of, then Negative SEO debates, are we still seeing what we are doing? Who will stop the FUD?

There are plenty of people who have never done anything wrong but they think Google might still suspect them of something shady. Other people are simply scared that now their competitors must be able to drop them out of Google by link-bombing.

So, is Google really right fighting spam that way? And are you really supportive of that, Rand?

Now, again, I am apologizing not because I am disagreeing with you, Rand (which I still hate to do). I am apologizing because my comment is somewhat offtopic to your actual video about negative SEO :)

Ann, the FUD will multiply negative seo until there is clarity regarding whether these unnatural link messages being sent out are penalties or just warnings with link devaluation. Until then, we all form our own conclusions. In our case I am certain we were negatively affected due to dodgy links which we never knew about.

Ann has hit the nail right on the head. This is all about FUD and Google's attempt to associate SEO with spam. Google has been quite careful not to say directly that they don't like SEO, but it's so obvious and has been for years. SEO hurts their bottom line; they don't want anyone getting their "free traffic". And no, Google doesn't want to "give the most user-friendly results so that they can keep their billions of users happy". Get real. It's about profit.

Google will continue to tweak their algo and try and fight spam - nothing wrong with that. But they'll also continue their FUD campaign in an effort to scare businesses off SEO.

There are also combinations of these methods. I can easily get some questionable, cheap, obviously bought links, point them to my competitor and then file a spam report. There are many ways to do it, and I am convinced that it can work for sites that don't have extremely strong link profiles (probably 90%+ of the web)

I have never done any negative SEO against any of my competitors but I have done this on my own sites. I have for example a really niche site. The site has a decent design, good content (I have a degree and a Msc on this topic so I am confident about the quality) and some natural links (very few due to the nature of the topic). The site was ranking on the bottom of the first page and wouldn't move up. At some point I decided to use some questionable link building methods. The result was that the site was gone (not deindexed but lost all of its rankings). This may be stupid, but at the time I believed it was +EV (expected value) and to be honest I still do. For a site like that the difference between #10 ranking and a #1-3 ranking is about a monthly salary (where I live). The difference between a #10 and a #60 ranking is about a cup of coffee per day. Plus, it is a site that I can easily dump and recreate.

I know, I could have used white hat link building and in a lot of cases I do. But that doesn't mean that I will stop experimenting with methods that might be more cost effective and scalable, even if they are only short term.

About the argument that we should all strive to make the web a better place. As long as I am confident about the quality of the site (in terms of content) that I am promoting, I don't see how using some grey/black hat techniques is lowering the quality of the Internet.

I only work on my own sites, I don't do any SEO work for others but I find it hard to believe that professional SEO companies or professionals are trying to make the web a better place. They work for whoever pays them (I guess as long as the costumer owns a legit business and not something extremely shady). For example there is an online business that offers a product. I know that a well known and respected SEO company works for them. I have a clean site in that niche and was approached by them to promote their site/product. They offered me a great deal (not money to buy a link). The first thing I did before responding was to try out their product, and it was the worst product that I have ever tried in that niche so I declined the offer. The SEO company working for them has built or helped them build a nice site, has done some good white hat linkbuilding/SM work and the result is they are ranking really high. The question is: did they make the web a better place?

Some people ask "why doesn't google just remove the value of bad links instead of penalizing sites for them?". I believe the answer is simple, that would allow people to try to get as many possible "false negatives" as they want with very little consequence. There are obviously some thresholds, but I have very little doubt that Google is more actively penalizing for bad links.

#1 - if spam links are propping up good stuff, is it still spam or is it making the web worse?

#2 - does Google really just remove value from spam links, or do they have a threshold/algo to try to detect when a site is engaging in manipulative practices and penalize it more than just by removing link value?

On the first, it's my opinion that there's very few times when linkspam, even when pointing to good places, isn't hurting someone else. Linkspam fills the web with junk on its own. And inauthentic links that don't come from real relationships/editorial/quality stuff artificially push down someone who's done those good things (unless we're talking about "buy viagra" type SERPs where it's mostly spammers pushing down spammers).

On the second, I think you make a great point. Would love to hear Google talk about that more transparently at some point. For now, it's largely a mystery how they try to detect what's linkspam created by the site owners (or some connected party) vs. created by external spammers merely trying to hurt the site (though they do seem eerily good at this).

About #1: First of all I disagree with the term filling the term with junk. The web doesn't have a fixed capacity, there isn't a "pollution" problem. So as long as I am not doing anything to affect other sites directly (negative seo, spam comments etc) I don't feel bad about it. I also don't agree that links that come from relationships are good for the web. Relationships affect editorial judgement and may help promote lower quality sites/products. The same goes for perceived authority.

You see, links on the web are very rarely editorial in the true sense, like the references used to calculate Impact Factor (which I wouldn't be surprised if it was the base of the idea of pagerank).

Finally, some sites may be clean and have a great link building/inbound marketing strategy. That doesn't mean that the content/products they offer are superior. For example, they may spend significant amount of money/time to produce great infographics, guest blog posts, viral content/videos that will land them great links, social media buzz etc. However, if they are selling a service and I land on their site through a search looking for a service provider as an actual user/customer their link building tactics don't matter to me. No one will ever think "they offer a crappy service but they create amazing infographics it was well worth the money I spent"

Basically what I am saying is that:

good link building/marketing ≠ good site or service.

Google is saying that the OOP that sparked all these discussions, is supposed to even the playing field. In my opinion it creates a greater barrier to entry in most markets for smaller/newer sites and people that don't have the marketing budget/time.

you are right the web is unlimited. never to be filled up....but...the first few places on the search engine are certainly finite highly limited highly prized... and when someone searches for something if the first few results are filled with sites lifted to those positions without being extremely worthwhile sites, then they are just "pollution"....and WHEN google moves to endless scrolling instead of page1,2,3,4 they will not want all the seo crowd thinking that spamming their way to position 20 is worthwhile...

Google has to clean out the crap or die...try a search for hairdresser new york...... and realise that just a couple of months ago the first 5 pages were completely dominated by directories....... spam.. polution....

I would imagine 99% of site owners would never have to worry about negative SEO. You'd have to be fighting for some very high-traffic, big-money keywords and/or make enemies with certain types of people. Of course, the more successful your site becomes and the more it ranks for certain competitive keywords that the black hats want, the more you might want to heed Rand's fair warning.

You hit number one for a search term you can be damn sure there are somebody out there who will do ANYTHING to get that spot from you..

We have tried have something like this. We hired a seo company at some point who we found to be doing somewhat spammy links after which we fired them. Not many links mind you(500-600), but still enough for us to think "this can't be good".

Up pops a new competitor who are spamming the crap out of the web. We then started to notice lots and lots of sidewide links on spammy websites linking to us.. We are talking 80000+ links here. Links that we did not build and have since been trying to remove. When Panda hit we took a beating from our top spot we have had for close to 7 years. Dropped to 7th spot.

Guess who went the top spot?

We had a good going over our site, got a decent writer in and changed our product text for all products to be high quality and unique, after which we submitted a reconsideration request.

The Google search team got back to us with the dreaded "you have lots of unnatural links warning". We had a look and sure enough tons more spammy links + blog posts.Started the process of contacting everybody to get the links removed (which quite frankly is impossible, I would consider it a success if we got 5% taken down).

Anyways, seems our efforts were paying off and we moved to 2nd spot. Sales/Visitors picked up again as we continued our efforts.

Fast forward to Penguin this Tuesday . Dropped to 7th spot again, all our other main keywords tanked.. Traffic dropped by 40%.

I have no doubt this is all a result of the competitor using negative SEO on us. And the worst thing it is that it can done for very little money $100-500.

As for us I'm literally sitting here tearful, I just don't know how we can recover from this. When Panda hit we kept going keeping our 3 employees on the books hoping we could get back. Unless this is somehow reverted I will have to go to them over the next couple of weeks and tell them all that it is over.

My point is.. This is real, it is happening.. Be afraid, be very afraid.

Hopefully 99% of us never have to worry about it, but let me give you a hypothetical example of how negative SEO could hurt somebody who is "pure as the first winter's snow" even if there is no such thing as "negative link juice."

Suppose there's a blogger who knows nothing about SEO, which is probably the vast majority of bloggers. They're big into social media and they're starting to develop a large audience. Initially, most of their audience found them through social media and so either arrives from social media, direct url, or subscriptions. As a result there aren't many searches for their brand name.

Their social media presence doesn't attract many editorial links because they just aren't in the right kind of niche. People don't blog about them. But their popularity attracts a lot of attention from scrapers and they get a lot of retweets. All of this causes them to start pulling in some search engine rankings.

Eventually they end up pulling into a number 1 spot, taking it from some seriously dark SEO's super-niche keyword site. They react with a negative SEO campaign. They bombard the web with copies of all the posts on the site. They are completely indescriminate and keyword agnostic about it, because they don't want to fall under suspicion themselves.

If they're really nasty, maybe they auto-generate thousands of twitter bots that retweet every one of the blogger's posts in an incredibly aggressive and obviously manipulative manner.

All of this triggers a threshold in Google's aglorithm and suddenly almost every link the blogger obtained dissappears. All the scraper links are gone. All the retweets are gone, because they're just duplicate content. The site loses its rankings for every keyword and they lose half their traffic. The blogger has no idea why. Maybe they had recently quit their day job and now suddenly they don't have enough money to support themselves. They are devastated, decide that the web is just too unstable, and vow never to rely on it for income again.

This is a very realistic scenario and proof of concept that negative SEO really can hurt somebody who is perfectly innocent. It's a sad story, and unfortunately I think it means that "white hat SEOs" will be less likely to get hurt than the truly natural sites that have never even heard of SEO. That's good news for us but it very well could mean bad news for the web as a whole.

tl;dr: I think it's dangerous to assume that anybody who gets hurt by negative SEO was already asking for it to begin with.

I was a long time defender of google with the opinion that they would never allow "bad" links to pass "negative" value. I was wrong. Negative seo is very real, and with recent algorithm changes, easier than ever to perform. It's despicable that companies would hire black hatters to perform negative seo on their competitors, but it's happening EVERY day. If you refuse to believe it, we can never fix it.

The SEO community MUST stand together and send a clear message to google that passing negative juice from links is unacceptable.

I am fully aware of the effectiveness of the other possible techniques here, like code injection and spam reporting, but I think the most important discussion is if a link can hurt you. This has been discussed amongst SEO's and webmasters for a long time and is defnitely a polarizing issue.

So let's say for the sake of argument that a bad link pointing to a site could be like a "thumb down" so to speak, as many seem to suggest. Especially when there is a trend of these links. Why would Google not want to simply remove the value from those links rather than penalize them to eliminate this activity and the possiblity of negative seo campaigns? Seems like the simple answer, no?

I'm not saying it can or cannot happen currently. Just interested to hear the thoughts of why they would even consider links they feel are spammy.

I had been 100% in agreement with you until a couple of days ago when I stood back a bit from actually being involved in SEO in any way and thought the backlink situation 'from outside' as it were.

Now I'm only 50% in agreement :) - depending upon whether what I thought about is right or not. I blogged about my thoughts in my post 'Whats behind the 'Unnatural links' algorithm change?' (if you want to read it in full), but I'll try and put the most salient points here (not verbatim).

If people know they are safe from any effect of using nefarious methods to link build - SOME (MANY, No harm no foul!) will build spammy links.

If there is an effect, warning messages etc, then people will believe (correctly or not, I don't know) that negative-SEO link building is a good idea - and build spammy links.

Under scenario 2 - I think some people will employ negative-SEO; but many fewer. It is one thing to think I'll do this for myself, no-one gets hurt, it's completely something else to think, I know I'll go out to destroy someone! I think VERY MANY FEWER people will think, and do, this. So, less new SPAM I think.- Quite a number of sites who have employed bad link building (and some who have had it foisted up on them) will start reporting the links to Google (helping identify REAL spam sites from accidental spam sites)

In my view, over time, I think this will reduce the amount of SPAM linking; once people REALLY worry about the effect it can have. But only time will tell. But, in the mean time, I really feel sorry for the innocents in this, I really do.

Obviously there are going to be losers. If you are someone unfairly hit by the effects of ‘unnatural links’ then you may not be very happy with the situation. And would I be. No - but nothing I can do about it either except do what I can to clean up the mess (or not, another blog :) and try and recover) .

And I hope that Google is VERY reactive in re-instating the ‘good’ links for websites that genuinely make an effort and do so SPEEDILY.

But, in the Grand scheme, will this make things better? I hope so.

There is more, but in general terms this outlines my idea. I just hope I'm right.

If it becomes easier to get a site penalised (as seems so) than to create quality linkable content on your own site, pretty soon the most common SEO tactic will be to get your competitors penalised while doing little to promote your own site.

Penalising sites for "over-optimization" is just another way of Google saying "we give up". Or perhaps another way of Google saying "If you want to rank in SERPS, spend money with us".

I'm not sure I agree completely: Sure, creating good content and building a good link profile is difficult. NO argument there. And certainly, if you penalize spam links then penalising your competitors is easy.

But I'm not willing to accept that it's this or that. First, there's a big philosophical and logical difference between a goal of increasing my page's rankings vs a goal of decreasing another page's rankings.

Second, there's a fairly easy way to tell: if a site has been building quality content and links for a long time, a sudden spike in black-hat techniques should be a clear sign that something weird is going on.

Of course, the way gmail handled mail spam is not to penalize spammers, but to get better at filtering. Perhaps this is part of the solution.

It would be nice if there was more data out there. The most common evidence used to suggest that negative SEO can work is that SEOs often end up over optimizing themselves and getting themselves penalized. From there, the argument goes, somebody else should be able to do the same thing to you.

I'd be really interested to know if there's any data available on the nature of the penalty. Specifically, do we really know that a bad link can count against you? Or is it more of a threshold issue, where once you receive a certain percentage of a certain type of link, suddenly all links of that type are neutralized?

This could easily look like a penalty, because you will lose rankings. But instead of it actually being "negative link juice," it might just be that many of your previous links have suddenly lost their value.

Of course, even if this were the case, it wouldn't mean negative SEO is impossible. Algorithms are only so good, and Google could easily neutralize perfectly valid links in the process. This would, however, have an impact on just how effective negative SEO could be. If it is based on a threshold like this, negative SEO would only be able to neutralize a certain percentage of the links on your site. If it really is "negative link juice," we're entering interesting times.

Finally, there is the risk of being outright deindexed. That's an entirely different issue and there's no question that it can happen under some circumstances. I hope that Google will stick to only doing this in extreme and obvious cases of manipulation, but there will be inevitable false positives and that's a risk we all need to be aware of and guard against. Once you're deindexed, you're up against confirmation bias, and everything you've done in the past will be viewed with suspicion.

google looking at a site's link profile and deciding that it's got too many (any) spammy type links and dropping those links from having any +ve effect on the site's ranking position... ouch that hurts.. but if the site had good traffic - UX then that measure should become more +ve (longer time on site, more page views) relatively and the site should rise again.. because google is sure as hell not doing all this in isolation.. "we" think "panda" and "penquin" but it's way more than that.. its activity and edgerank and other site metrics(try add density, try a total content profile score) and loads of other things google is quite capable of measuring without anything like analytics being on the site (try site loadtimes, keyword density.. focus..recency.)..if those things are good then the site will rise again.. and the tool is an intelligent machine, it's trying things and learning all the time.... it;s refining its own algo... and here's a warning...and the simplest fastest way i could think of getting a site deindexed would be to do the SEO "expert" thing of going out and building loads of "natural links' to replace the links that have been lost....

how easy would that be for google to spot .. LOL...

and try and explain to them that you weren't trying to manipulate the search engine when you ask for a reindexing review..

so expect a secondary round of penquin... to not only remove the worth of spammy links but to completely deindex sites that work too hard to recover their position in the search engine rankings.....i think leslie rohde has it pretty much nailed.. and now is a good time to be getting out the red pen

In most cases, devaluation is exactly what happens. In extreme cases, though, we do see penalty-scale actions that seem to be entirely link-based. It's hard to prove 100%, but at this point I have no personal doubt that a bad enough link profile is enough. It's important to note, though, that this is uncommon. Devaluation is often Google's approach, for exactly the reasons you describe - simple negative SEO is just too easy.

Because we are NOT a network. We are community. This is a forum where you can find places to post, and connect with other human beings - not a connected series of blogs, many on the same server, offering cheap spun content and occasionally malware. Bloggers are never compensated for the content they publish (we ban any attempt to do that). Bloggers publish the content because the WANT it, they link to the authors because they WANT it. That's guest blogging which is free and works for mutual benefit.

Another great summary of whats being disucssed right now. What is interesting about this summary though is that you tlak about the links being potentially damaging. At a recent search conference I went too they spoke about trying to get ridof those links, which is a bit hard if you've say 1000 of them ... how would you advise a company dilute the bad juice from those links?:

Does anyone know of any cases where someone got an unnatural links warning/penalty, submitted a reconsideration request and actually got a favorable outcome? Ive only heard of either people getting canned responses or even more of a penalty.

I have great interest in this but the fact is this subject is in my opinion DANGEROUS! For all the blackhatters who have the full toolkit (would rather not name) each time a blackhat technique expires / is fixed that tool becomes even more powerful to use in negative SEO.

I have ran a proof of concept (on my own server) using various blackhat tools and would have to say the big thing I fear (as I know it works) is someone with the knowledge to knock a server offline and the ability to force index on the subsequent 404.

This is a hot topic right now and I cannot think of many scalable solutions for Google to fix if they arise.

Its interesting that a multi billion dollar company like Google falls for this crap. My rankings went up after Panda but now i have lost 80% off my traffic and according to Webmaster tools only have 42 webpages indexed out of 565.

I think its something to do with changing domains 6 months ago and the change of address has expired as well as Google treating my old domain and redirects as a Parked domain.

All my content is mainly tutorials, no ads and and no manual penalty according to Google. How will i know for sure what the problem is?

It could be my keyword competitors spamming my links all over the place but there's nothing i can do about this.

My traffic starting taking a serious dive from the 12th April and hasn't stopped

I'm the guy on Fiverr who had the nseo gigs that the blogosphere has been talking about. *braces self* Anyway, you should know that they were all rejected by fiverr, who understandably, frowns upon negative seo.
However, while I have a new gig up for simply building over 6,000 backlinks, and another one for over 10,000 links, (under the name NegativeSEOguy) I feel any buyer could get a similar effect from using other gigs that are similar. So, yes, this is a gap in the search algorithm, but let me suggest that there might be times when some feel this gap can, and should, be exploited for good reasons, such as when a competitor puts up a site like '(yourbrand)sucks.com' or if you have stuff on the first page that you don't want prospective employers to see.
I've had people buy my gigs that are losing business because some joker puts up a free blogger site that makes unfounded accusations...yes, this could be actionable under the context of 'libel', but nothing is to stop the person from doing it again...also, some people are extorting businesses with 'Hey, if you like your current ranking, and want it to stay that way, pay us $x...if not, we'll blast you down to page 300.'
The next 6 mos will be a Wild West as far as the serps are concerned, with people trying to gain and retain rankings by any means necessary. Perhaps the good thing about NSEO is that it reveals the need for search to evolve once again.

Big thanks for this. I used to be heavy into the grey areas promoting my blog. Even though I quit about 2 years ago with the funny business, I'm still a little worried some of my past transgressions may hurt me now.

Thanks Rand, I have a client who recently dropped many positions for no apparent reason; but upon closer inspection I noticed the home page robot meta had been changd to noindex nofollow.I will be doing a closer inspection of the entire site to determine what else may have been done.I hope the SE's find a way to identify negative linking.

Thanks, Rand, great WBF. I'm looking forward very much to seeing the tools you, Matt, and the rest of the team come up with. I have the definite sense like you're onto something awesome.

Let's make the assumption that negative SEO does work, and the even larger assumption that it works on established brands or sites with clean marketing practices. It's still a really F*$%ing stupid thing to do. Link sabotage might be illegal - and impersonating someone else while threatening legal action almost definitely is.

If you can't beat your competition without resorting this kind of cheap tactic, chances are you've already lost to them. If you'd rather spend time making other people worse rather than making yourself better, strategic business decisions might not be your forte. Chances are quite good that the winning site will overtake you again as soon as they sort things out with Google.

The link sabotage stuff discussed in the third example likely is illegal in many jurisdictions (removing folks from Google Reviews, falsely emailing to have links removed claiming to be attorneys with DMCA, etc).

Rand. Thank you. Enjoyed this installment very much. Wondered, if this is even the appropriate forum to make requests, if you might consider a WBF on shared hosting v. VP v. dedicated and the various impact each option has on Google's appraisal of your site. I ask because a few times you mentioned IP and of course shared hosting, it is this greenhorn's understanding, can undermine sincere efforts to do good stuff with your website.

Great vid Rand. I've been following these developments over twitter etc over the last week and a half - and it's a fun time to be had by the looks of things - How long will Dan Thies' site be penalised for? Is this a 3 month penalisation (max/min)? That being said - for a couple of new greyish hat start up sites ... when he comes out of it - he's gonna have thousands of links that may one day count for something...when big G goes full circle. That's worth a bit of reputation sacrifice if you ask me. Top trumps! These guys might have actually done him a favour in the long run!

Is anyone interested in working together to reverse engineer updates as big as this or perform SEO tests as a "community"?

Sure we can all figure out new updates and run tests individually or as private businesses with interllectual properties...but time and expense are always factors - can a part of the cost factor be reduced by member efforts? Ie. With an army as opposed to a team?? Will a dedicated community who publicly involve, engage, unravel and discuss actual real live testing environments be a beneficial commodity in any SEO Forum? This is one way that we can fully test the implications of negative SEO or (on the opposite side of the scale) new / evolving white hat marketing tactics.... ...Opinions?

I've seen this spring up and it scares the hell out of me. Thanks for pointing this out and putting some truth there.

In my humble opinion, Google will need to correct and make sure these things stay valuless. As much as I hate to admit it, there are some very unethical people out there and I hate to see it effect the innocent. Thanks again. Laura

I think we can all agree that some of the latter techniques go beyond black hat SEO. In fact, negative SEO, in and of itself, is something entirely different. I would argue that detracting from another's brand manipulatively is significantly more malicious than promoting your own in the same manner. Both, of course, detract from the quality of the web.

It will be interesting to see more case studies. Here's to hoping the good guys win.

It's interesting becase I was talking about this a year ago on an SEO forum (can't remember which one at the moment), and it's a little shocking that more of this hasn't happened earlier. I think it's great that the white hat community is finally picking up on these things, and that it's something that should absolutely be on the forefront of people's minds. Especially now with two high-profile attacks, this is going to spawn tons of copycats and tons of people setting up fly-by-night "kill your competitors" businessess (just like the Google Places attacks of marking a competitors business as closed spawned a small cottage industry of "place killers").

This is why I agree with Rands view of self-policing the industry. If we don't make a concerted push to let everyone know that this is NOT what SEO is about, people will think all of us in online marketing act like this.

Dan Thies has been sounding the alarm about blog networks for 3 or 4 years now, so I think it's ok for him to take his victory lap now. He's been very generous to the seo community (and I don't think he's ever outed anyone). It's sort of like Bill Cosby and his poundcake speech, Dan's earned the right to complain.

A big deal was made about these blog networks that got hit, but Google also hit grey hatters with widget bait, link bait, and mass "guest blogging" operations.

I just wonder what will happen to the sites who have 100% natural links, but might not be the most relevant for the terms they rank for.

There is a guy today who ranks in the top 10 for "Make Money Online" because he received a ton of press 5 years ago for being a successful SEO (from the Phillipines) at 14 years old. That's a great story, but that doesn't make him the most relevant source of information on how to make money online.

It was really a highly enlightening and informative video, is there a way to download it? Thanks a lot Rand! Never knew such a thing could ever happen. The evil doers will always be present where there is GOOD and that's the law of the nature. But all the good folks must all fight it out to see that these Negative guys don't succeed and get away with their nasty plans. Thanks !

I just wanted to thank you for this video. I (like everyone else) have been reading and seeing a lot of posts and forum discussions about negative SEO. But, I didn't take it seriously, until a few days ago, I got an email where the sender threaten me with negative seo. Saying he would fire up his link building softwares and build 1000's of forum profile and other kinds of spa links to my site in an effort to get my site to lose ranking.

Turns out he was one of my advertisers who was not happy with the results he got from an ad he had run on my site and was expecting a refund (after his ad ran for a full month, lol), but since I refused, he got angry and threaten me with negative SEO.

So, that kind of got me worry and I am glad I just watched your video especially the part where you explain how to keep a site at a lower risk of being effected by such unethical tactics. So thank you very much for yet another high quality and truly useful video.

Hi there! Forgive me if my name offends, but it's relevant to this post. I think my case won't be unique, but I categorise it in the same basket as negative Seo. Naturally my personal biases must be set aside when evaluating my situation so let me present only facts:

1. Our aged site validates, clean code, low bounce rate, high rate of returning visitors. Only original content. No over use of keywords or the like.
2. An Seo company we hired built thousands of blog network backlinks without telling us.
3. Before those links manifested, we ranked well, and had a balanced profile.
4. We got an unnatural links letter and rankings fell a few weeks thereafter, before Penguin. Penguin has had no consequence to us anyway. But we are ranking worse than we did before the bad links were built.
5. The Seo company are less than helpful, and most of the links cant be removed.

Did this Seo company mean to harm our rankings? I doubt it. But they have, and to me, it was negative, Seo!

See my point?

I am going to take legal action against the seo, but that's another matter. Importantly, this has convinced me that negative Seo is possible and likely to rise. But still, it's not all about questions of ROI, time or litigation (incidentally how easy would litigation be in another country say), it's also about anger, sadism and power mongering. Will google fix this problem? I hope so.

I don't see Negative SEO picking up as an industry. The amount of effort it takes, even as described by your article, to take down a site seems massive and would only seem to work on a site that does not hold much authority like that of a small business. This would mean that you'd have to spend a lot of money to get the site of a small competitor taken down.

Another reason I don't think this will pick up on a large scale is that already the first page of google for many keywords is full of rubbish sites that don't deserve to be there, this in turn proves that although these dark practices are frowned upon, Google still seems to overlook many offenders.

Been looking something to clarify my mind on negative SEO and good thing that you have cosnidered the topic for the Whiteboard Friday. Indeed it was helpful and will be looking forward for updates on this regarding on the "experiment" that you will be making.

I know it's actually a fairly commonly used tatic for reputation management employed with controlling/limiting affiliates ranking too highly for branded search terms. Problem is it works so clients encourage their agencies to keep doing it....

I cry each time my mates advise they have bought another round of links off Fivver because they say they keep doing it as it works... and they perceived cost is so low they will continue to do it... if the domain gets burnt they will just slot in a new one and start the process again

A great video that explains a lot that webmasters and SEOs need to know - even if they dont like it or havent started believing it can happen yet. I must admit I like Kevin's idea above a lot. Doing it by domain also would be pretty efficient.

this is my first randfish vid and i was surprisingly entertained. i get the vibe that you belong on a sitcom. you are obviously very knowledgeable about SEO and know all the big players. yet your presentation was mixed with a bit of humour, irony, and some awkwardness. i hear they are casting for 'how i met your mother.'

why do you act shocked about the behaviour of black hat seo? its a necessary evil. and just like most things in life, the shades of gray is what makes life worth living.

Negative SEO is real it has been for a while. I think we all know sites with great on-site seo and unique content, that have been penalised for their back-links practice. i.e excessive buying of links, no achor-text diversity, automated blog-commenting, xrummer blasts etc. Now in 99% of cases these were done by the website owner.. But they are completely external factors, so there is absolutely no reason why anyone would not be able to do this too a competitor... ITS REAL PEOPLE!

Big G need to stop penalising for back-link profile, and start de -valuing/ignoring the links...

Anyone who doesn't believe it's real only needs to do a quick search around the web for the email Google sends out to people they believe are artificially building back links to their sites stating specifically they've been penalised and submit a reconsideration request once they've cleaned up their back-link profile.....

if it is possible to take some site down with negative seo, then it will be a war between seo agencies, instead of trying to get valuable links, they are going to masslink eachother, but nobody knows what Google is going to do .. it's like you can't predict the future :D

Hello Rand, Thank you for such an informative video... I am a keen leaner and have got to learn a lot aboutnegative SEO throgh this. I am starting with an SEO and hope will get to learn a lot from your site. I have already bookmarked your site and have started to get to read Beginners' Guide to SEO Thumbs up tome ;) Thank you Ruby

Is there a way to find out if a backlink is from a shady domain? I'm looking for a directory or list of known black hat domains? Anything like that out there? As a way to monitor any potential negative campaigns against us?

Well after all this concerns about negative-seo i think it is time that we have some kind of tools to defend us from this kind of activities, like a checkbox within GWT to ignore domains that links to our website.

Can this feature be used as a manipulative tool to take down questionable-links built by the the webmaster itself? Yes it can, but Google could use a simple workaround for this problem: let us disable in GWT only those domains that popped up in our link profile 2-4 weeks before the link ignore request.

That would fix the problem and any kind of strange behaviour users could have with this new tool. Plus it will also make the spamfight task that Google enganges everyday easier (you could evaluate questionable sites basing yourself on how many removal requests the would get ... and this is just an example).

There is more poor qualit content/spam ranking now than when MC started. Page one for commercial terms has "Meet the team" and "Find us" and"Coming Soon" pages from the same site ranking ahead of proper informative URL's from any opposing sites. Google are domain cramming the top 7 (For most - googles page one is now 7 sites not 10) with URLs from the same domain. The amount of advertising they are putting in (adwords, banners, general "look at us we're Google" crud) now takes 47% of the average footprint of the page where only a year ago it was 42% and as recently as 2008 it was under 35%. Seems the biggest spammer and self promoter here is Google. Google = A massive paid link directory, ironically, pretty much the sort of site they themselves tell us "adds no value".

The world is full of good and bad things thus the same is also applicable in the marketing or digital media. Everything has its positive side but also negative side it depends upon the people how they perceive. SEO also has white hat methods , black hat methods and also gray hat methods and its important for any business who want to crop long term benefits must follow the positive path (white hat SEO).

wow I can't believe you had the same worries about negative search engine optimization back then too. Guess somethings never change. Wonder when Google will figure out how to protect against this somehow...if that's even possible.

My site had been in position 6 for months for a popular personal injury key-phrase. In December it dropped down out of the top 200 positions and we cant see it anywhere now. We had mainly done good quality content marketing such as infographics, high quality expert articles and interactive apps to build brand awareness which also generated links. Content is unique. We have now analysed the back links to the site and found hundreds of links from off-topic (e.g. gambling) websites often site wide blog roll links that we did not ask for, build or buy. Although it was an exact match domain, we had good quality links, e.g. even from a .gov website and someone has certainly attempted negative SEO. examples of bad links that have been pointed to us include:

I know that the SEOmoz community in general is 'holier than thou' when it comes to SEO, but I'd have to disagree with a lot of the statements made and implied in this whiteboard. In an ideal world, they would be true. However, computers are not (yet) 'smarter' than humans. Things like linkwheels, SEnukeX, and other 'spammy' type of tactics are still incredibly effective, even for single keyword national rankings (I know from experience). Although one day this may not be the case, currently saying they do not help is simply a lie. Worried about future negative impacts? 301 redirects, my friends. :)

Great WBF - I'm not sure negative SEO can have a real impact if you're a 'brand' with a varied and ever-growing backlink profile, but for smaller sites this is a real worry. Let's hope Google reverts to suspicious links being devalued rather than punished (if in fact that is the case).

If you aim to provide quality content that is value-adding, how can Google penalize you for that? They have thought about it, but I am with you, I am not losing any sleep over it. It’s about time that over-optimization and manipulation techniques get penalized, and those who provide kick-ass content will prevail.

Super classy and comprehensive analysis on negative seo. I would agree that for brands it has become a challenge to fight the negative reputation, like someone trying to manipulate Google Reviews and using Malware attacks to make it look like Spam.

Let me share my recent expereince with you, 1 month ago my client received a announcment/review on their Google Places that "they are going to shutdown due to bad economy", and posted all sorts of apologetical crap on the official places page...boom ..it took all of us by a surprise. We posted a thread in Google Support forums about that fake announcement, and you know what it took 25 minutes for them to take down that announcement and we were saved.

I think its good that Google implementing more and more strong signals to detect spam and crap on the web, plus your guidance and help is great for those who are willing to make their web presence an authentic resource...! Thums UP

Wish I could agree. The video alluded to google places reviews, and didn't address the other side of the coin: fake negative reviews that can destroy a business's (who ranks well!) reputation. Now google places reviews are replete with fake positives and negatives due to zero moderation and service, and some exploit this flaw. This flaw has been in existence for ages, so I'm doubtful that google will do anything about negative Seo either. In other words I think they're content to punish honest business owners who didn't create their own dodgy links.

"and he said, I see, I don't remember what it was, 14,000 odd links pointing to this site, but Google's actually only counting about 30 of them. That's why you're not ranking very well. Most of those links we've removed all the value that they pass. So it's not that they were having those bad links hurt the site. It's just that they're saying, "Oh these are not going to pass any more link value.""

if this is the case then how are people effecting sites negativly? if google just discount them then there should be no effect. This is the whole reason they did the negative seo in the first place. To prove that having a penalty applied for spammy backlinks is both wrong and stupid.

If google just discounted them rather than giving a penalty then this WBF would not even be here!

A bit longer than most white boards but I really enjoyed the technical SEO info discussed! I feel negative SEO and spam attacks can really hurt your rankings but will see a change with how links will be interpreted and solid on-site SEO will be even more important (without 'over optimizing').

I totally agree that seeing an industry supply negative SEO services just turns my stomach and I'd hate to see it take off!

I'm the guy on fiverr under the name: negative_seo who had the nseo gigs. They were all rejected by fiverr, who understandably, frowns upon negative seo. However, while I have a new gig up for building over 10,000 backlinks, and though it isn't for negative seo (though I can't control what buyers want to use it for), I feel any buyer could get a similar effect from using any gigs that are similar. I'm getting tons of orders every day for my gig, so it makes me think that we're entering a new wave in internet search where people are playing for keeps. Note, many people buy my link blasts in the hopes of de-ranking a site that is posting lies about them or their company...who can blame them for wanting to protect their reputation?

Wow. Great WBF and even better comments. Knowing the risks and coming up with mitigation strategies for dealing with Negative SEO is important so the advice is much appreciated. I agree with Ann that we need to be aware of the FUD and its impact to the less informed, but at the same time, see the value of awareness for the exprerienced webmasters/SEOs.

Risk acceptance is sometimes a strategy, but should be taken on with an understanding of the risk, the magnitude of impact if the risk is realized and the cost of employing mitigation strategies. Risk acceptance is a fine strategy in certain instances, but should be a choice not a chance outcome.

Great suggestion about enhancing WMT to support disassociation of inbound links at the domain level and looking forward to SEOMoz OSE "SPAM Factor" enhancemet. Also looking forward to some definitive data regarding whether links alone (outside of SEO/Webmaster direct control) can bounce your site/domain out of the index vs. just lower your rankings.

If that aspect is true and not a myth, then it is scary indeed and should be made an illegal act akin to slander. The issue would enforcement and proving who performed the damaging link spam. Current technology would make enforcement hard if not impossible in many/most cases.

It's from scriptlance, where the buyer is asking for an seo to "delist" a competitor.

"we want to delist competitor website for one search keyword term in search engine ranking in google/yahoo/bing and one small task please pmb the methods you will use and how fast you can do it thanks"

I can't believe someone has posted that. That's not only bad seo but it reeks of desperation. I would imagine if a site was already ranking then it would be fairly difficult to get them delisted, sites usually get delisted because they have used bad practices in the past and are now paying the price. It's retroactive delisting.

Thanks Rand, That is a scary thought that people can cause you harm with negative SEO... I would love to see the feedback on the experiments that you want to conduct to test the theory. I think that Google must be able to pick up if somebody is conducting negative SEO to bring you down...

But thank you again for the Whiteboard Friday, I'm learning a lot about SEO from this blog and my level of knowledge tripled since my PRO subscription...

Great video Rand and thanks for sharring. The big question is 'Does google penalize you for having poor/spammy links pointed to your site' OR do they simply ignore those links and NOT give credit (authority)...I know you feel that they simply 'ignore' them but I'm not so sure.

Also- by having the 'orginal source' meta tag, would this eliminate the ability for evil-doers to duiplicate you content all over the net and hurt you? We do this as standard procedure (just in case).

On a side note, the Penguin crack-down has been huge and many may 'think' they've been sabotaged by others when in fact its just Penguin.. my gut tells me that Penguin is mostly about 'on-page' seo tacticts going too far and less about 'poor quality links'.. what do you think?

Rand, see referring a site specifically is not smart act, its cunning that’s what Aaron Wall was suggesting especially when you report same thematic campaigns which conflict with your own business objectives (we can cite ‘SEO company’ which you targeted before). So it’s like dissecting your competitor’s efforts, while reporting it publicly - when it was ranking very well. Because that time SEOmoz was providing consultancy services too :) . And when it becomes conclusive then it matters most.

Google is not blind, they have build robust system with supportive algos for processing their database to extract high quality sites for SERPs. Manual reporting dis-balances the uniform playing field. And there are thousands of keywords on which Google falters or shows wrong results not giving due importance to trusted or authority sites. But you choose to be biasedly subjective.

Every site has certain loopholes and fail to adhere to SEO guidelines (or so called Google guidelines which are again conflicting when you compare them with alert messages that WMT users receive). So publicly reporting is a foul play and can be deemed as negative SEO; until you are not reporting thugs or spammers or overnight site closers who dupe innocent users.

Here I am not suggesting that we should not follow google guidelines but what you did publicly was not white hat either ;) . Outsmarting with skills is different than repeatedly outwitting in wicked manner.

I sincerely respect you very much. But on this professional aspect, I certainly differ, you cannot preach on negative SEO when you yourself followed it religiously not once but umpteen times- and till today you are justifying it. Apart from this, negative SEO that you suggested is matter of concern even for Google. And we ourselves had been victim of it.

P.S. Also it would be great if the comment box is made draggable to increase the size while posting comment. This is my first comment - never felt like rebutting before :)

I mean, we watch WBFs, follow the latest tips on inbound.org and do what we "should" do as good SEO guys. But when I see sites like www.lifeinsurerslist.net/ ranking high with 0 backlinks and stuff it really gives me this "WTF" feeling. Did I miss something?

Back to the topic:

16:30 Rand, consider adding that meter on SEOMOZ toolbar, so when we go to any site it shows Good (green)/Neutral/Spam (red color)

Yep! That's one of our goals. Right now, there's nothing to really tell folks when a site matches patterns of stuff Google's penalized/banned. Our goal with the spam score is to do that (the same way we've done with rankings on Domain + Page Authority).

Excellent WBF Rand, thanks for sharing such information. Can you please share that forum post either here or anywhere (Twitter or email) with me?

2 days ago I replied a comment on SEOMoz.org/blog by saying Google may not penalize a website by only following one signal, but it seems that spammers have figured it out too and now they are also operating in multi-dimensions.

One more thing that I would like to add here is we can also minimize the risk of these attacks if our websites have good reputation in social media channels, because before penalizing Google does review a website from all aspect and valuable social shares and positive feedback keep us away from such risks.

"One more thing that I would like to add here is we can also minimize the risk of these attacks if our websites have good reputation in social media channels, because before penalizing Google does review a website from all aspect and valuable social shares and positive feedback keep us away from such risks."

BTW I have found that forum post and after reading it full, I have two varied conclusion:

1. I wonder why does Google not re-consider the penalization.

2. May be the guy from justgoodcars.com wrote this post after penalization.

On the basis of personal analysis I would say that point 2 has more value because nobody would say such thing openly when he knows all his efforts might ruined up. Moreover, the joined date of user (negativeseo) is same as of post.

I know you touched upon this point slightly, but surely with all the sites that are being wrongly caught up in the net and loosing their rankings due to the update. Matt Cutts should think about only rewarding sites based on good ranking factors and just ignoring poor quality links. This would soon put a complete stop to all the negative SEO sites that are beginning to appear.

Great WBF Rand, or not? This is not quite happy news for ending the workweek. You wanne send us into the weekend with major concerns? ;-)

This negative SEO can be as fatal as the disasters that happen in the financial world. Trying to grow with your website, every time with small steps forward. And then Bammm .. everything completely wiped out by these manipulative techniques that others have released on your website. A link to your website is an invitation, a reference and confirmation that interesting info exists on this page. An invitation ... should you not accept if first before there is an confirmation and the links truly exists?

Is there no system or possibility that allows you to first accept incoming link, before they work. Otherwise they will be killed and redirected to ... a spam reporting tool, muhahahaha ;-). This could be integrated in a GWT environment too I guess.

As you know @Rand about today Google updated the Panda 3.5 and introduce some new algorithm in their search result so, I am little bit confused about "Webspam" and its working.How it work in search engine? I have seen some website which doesn't have any backlink but therefore those websites on the top position. Don't you think that is not fair with us.

Google Penguin - Parked Domains, Panda 3.5, and now Penguins. Google sure does like its "P's". All of this within the space of 9 days. That's a lot of changes for us webmasters to wrap our head around, but still i must say these changes are good for white hat :)

We have a large international brand currently getting hit with Spammy backlink coming out of china.

Is their any way to help protect their brand when all the links that are coming in are in the format of "brand name - product of company" All these links are coming from very very spammy sites and are all new.

Will we see a ditch of major brands using these exact same "spammy" techniques? Cause right now, and just watching travel related serp's, I see a lot of big brands using very spammy techniques - and they weren't targeted like the small guys.

We have noticed a drop in rankings over the past few months and when I've been looking at our backlinks we have 1000's of links from JustGoodCars.com and what looks like a network of sites all with the name justgood"carname".com.

So the question is if you have spammy links pointing to your site but your site is not deindexed - Is your time better spent attempting to remove those links or continuing to build quality, whitehat links?

If contacting Google were easy, this might not be as much an issue. I don't think Google ever responds to those reconsider request. I had a brand new domain name that apparently was banned before I registered it. After looking into it, I learned that someone had owned the domain prior to me and they got it banned. They then let it expire and I bought it months later.

Google has yet to respond. It should be cut and dry that the spam was not from me based on the registration and drop data.

Bottom line, Google could fix a lot of these issues if they wanted to. As far as negative SEO, issue a challange for a PR4 or PR5 site. Someone outside of SEOMoz that has access to Google like the rest of us. That site will be gone within a few weeks. It's terrible, but realistic.

Couldn't agree more. I wrote about a similar problem, above. Over at Google forum one person pointed out that there was an almost duplicate (same niche, similar keyword EMD and exactly the same theme). She asked if it was mine as it may also have had the same content (or some copied). I have no idea who the writer was nor who did the copy site, but what gets me is that when I checked the whois, it had been registered months after my site was on the front page. My site was totally dimped from the cache and the copy was not.

I scratch my head in amazement every time I read of how clever Google is at catching cheats. Man, this was so easy to get right and they didn't.

Rand explained a good way of resolving attacks, Just tell Google and they'll ignore the links. I’ve heard that this can sometimes have a long term positive effect on the websites SERP too (don’t quote me on that though).

As for resolving a big attack, like that of Just Good Cars, I wouldn’t know where to start… that was some evil shiz!

"Just tell Google"? Rand, DT and the like may be able to have a chat to Google but I certainly cannot. Last year they completely dumped a site of mine that was on the first page (has stayed there on Y&B). I spent months running around trying to find out why. On their forum I could only get two people to talk to me about it. They were both very dismissive and anonymous; I have no idea if they know anything at all. Still, I tackled everything I could get a lead on. One forum person told me the site was spammy because it repeated the site name in the urls. I couldn't figure that out but finally tracked it down to the theme. Seems that the person I bought the site from had some blind links to WP. I changed the theme and totally reworked the site except for just cleaning up the original posts. Found xenu and cleaned up everything I could. I requested a review - 6 months later it was rejected without explanation. I gave up.

Someone I read suggested that a better idea would be for Google to tell you what they don't like and then if you fix it but do it again... kabam! Strikes me as a better way of treating sincere people rather than assuming they know what they have done wrong.

Just checked Google Webmaster Tools. Current count is 47,522, with ~70% of those coming from just a few domains that look like sitewide spam links (could be the start of the hornet's nest I kicked up last week). Will have to keep an eye on that :-)

Nice video/article Rand, as I am new to SEO in some respects (mainly the design side of the web) I am still trying to get my head around many elements of SEO, I am glad you have pointed out some of the BH methods so I can avoid them like the plague and continue on a nice clean path.

What are the best methods to detect backlink spam issues. I have used the Open Explorer, but am still not sure if some sites can be classified as Spam or not. Despite looking spammy some sites still have good DA etc. Avoid these or not? Even if the content is relevent.

Any help appreciated.

Kind regards

Tim - PS great talk you gave at LinkLove London last month. It was my first SEO/LinkBuilding Conference and I learnt quite a lot, that is despite being a little apprehensive on link building now the latest google changes seem to be affecting rankings(or is that just me).

For your own site, Google Webmaster Tools is a pretty good way to check on links (it updates more frequently and has a bigger index than OSE, though metrics, anchor text, views, etc are absent as are competitor links). If you're seeing stuff you're very considered about, you could always file a pre-emptive re-consideration request, though as I point out in the video, ifyou're keeping the site clean/white hat, there's rarely much to worry about.

Does anyone can come up with all the major negative sings for Google? I hope Dr Pete would have dignosed the signs. Rand you are so right and yes more signals should be introduced to keep the industry a valueable one.

I do agree that negative SEO is harmful for our industry but this update of Google says "we want to give best user experience" by penelize those sites who did unnatrual links..

i read a post of matt cutt in google webmaster center blog regarding this update and just surf through some comments and found that on some most competitive keywords like "Make Money Online" they give ranking to blog of blogspot.com that have NO page or NO content or nothing creation on that blog.. and there are severl other keywords as well which provides your very irrelevent result.. so whats the benifit the end number of users get from google? does it consider as BEST USER EXPERIENCE?

I am not against of this update but sucks with those irrelevent result and also for decrease some really usefull sites' rankings.

Negative SEO is quite a vicious area, especially in areas such as Poker where these types of tactics have been on going for a long time. But yeah I think the real businesses that will be hurt with these types of tactics are SME business who can easily be hit hard, when Google Search Quality does an audit on a high quality site if they see 1000's of high quality links then the spam will not hurt it. But if you are a small business and only have a limited number of links and you get hit the search quality team will hit it quickly.

One more reason to completely stay away from BH seo. Wonder if the Google Algoritm also could work in reverse for you. That google creates that one and only tool to run a full backwards backlink check based on their "blacklists"

It will be a damn shame if Negative SEO practices becomes a widely accepted reality. I firmly believe Google should remove the ranking potential of spammy linking for example and not drop the rankings on sites with spammy links. After all black hat SEO companies that chose to buy spammy links are frivolously spending their Clients (or their) budgets. Let them to continue to if they wish, its just their money they are wasting. But to create a loophole were hardworking ethical SEO companies and website owners could be hit by unethical SEO companies, that doesn't seem right?

Rand this is a great post and I've given it big thumbs up. I've even gone so far as to share it with some of my clients. However, I am more than a little concerned that you've opened a Pandora's Box. For those just starting off in this industry and eager to impress clients this post might become a road map to evil. Turning to the dark side is always easier than staying in the light for the uninitiated.

We uncovered a manipulative link ring on over 4000 hacked wordpress sites hosted at Godaddy. We found a website that was hacked and acting as a portal to capture database info from other wordpress installs. It was set up to run a script to publish a list of over 400 links on over 4000 blogs as new blog posts. One click of the script and 1.6 million links were posted. They exploited the write access given to the wp-uploads folder and injected the scripts and the files containing the database info and the links they were "syndicating". This stuff gets really dangerous when it scales up like this. From what I could tell, it was linking from business websites and blogs to unmentionable websites, and we found how big the problem was when they came to us claiming they lost all their traffic and needed help fixing it. Well, one look at their link profiles (backlinks and outbound links) uncovered the enormous mess they were in. We moved their hosting, sured up the vulnerability, and removed the outbound links. After a month or so, things started to improve.

Rand, I can appreciate your attempts to shed some light on this stuff. Sooner or later, SEOs are going to have to undo damage caused by this kind of stuff. Keep it up.

Thank you very much Rand for another exciting video. Friday comes after 6 days .So its a long wait to see top quality video from you. But that's what we have to do :)

You have explained the negative SEO in a very perfect manner. I got your point. I am little confused about the neagtive SEO that we do for our sites by ourself. I mean we use services like UAW, Senukex, AMR, MAN etc to rank the site. Is it better to leave them at all or find a startegy to use them in a natural way. I know there are lots of comments and my question will remain unanswered unless I email you personally :)

I personally think those tools/services and the spammy link building tactics that accompany them make the web a worse place and make the SEO industry look bad. Others may disagree, but that's my perspective. I want to earn my marketing, and there's nothing authentic, natural or long-term about those methods.

Awesome WBF! I would just like to say that Google should simply stop penalties arising from this as this is something that a person have no control of. Unlike if your violation was onsite. People can still do this but for nothing at all.

Since there was a message in Google webmasters on Dan's case, this clearly shows that his website was flagged and with connection or not - a sudden drop in rankings that has been there for a while already probably can only amount to a few reasons of its drop.

If this is the case - any site can be targeted and no one is protected. Even if it takes just a webmaster request for re-inclusion, it will still take time and loss of money.

Now what if people are guilty of doing this and then to be re-included they simply said they didn't? How would Google handle this?

Google should have a response to this issue and a workaround if what not.

Great thread Rand. I'd read the Traffic Planet thread long back - over the whole of last week right from the previous weekend - so was kind of updated with what's going on. But it is great to hear here in details from you.

In the meantime, we tried to explain the classification angle (the true/false positive/negative) on our blog: http://gegetech.com/blog/negative-seo-whats-the-buzz - it is only the spam classifications that can give a penalty or can be ignored. So the question boils down to two parts: (a) was the classificaction right and (b) if the classification said "this is a spam" then what's the policy on it - ignore or penalize.

Essentially that's all there is to it in theory. The rest of it is all about practice.

Sadly I do see negative seo being a growing trend which is immoral, illegal and down right dirty. Seriously, it takes a horrible person to ruin someone else hard work, but what goes around does come around. However, not to start up and endless debate on whether or not a link can hurt you or not I am very confident in saying that if you have a very positive link profile with a Moz DA rating of over 70 or 80 I don't see the impact of negative seo being that much of a problem.However, sites with lower authority and a limited amount of good quality backlinks this could hurt sites in the beginning stages of development. Since it is apparent that Google has rolled out its new algo combating spam I predict that building links slower will be more apparent in the upcoming months.

It is just amazing that individuals would go to this much trouble to bring down websites. I am sure if this has happened there will be more of this going on, and in a game-like fashion there will be more "joiner's" coming in to one-up the last big take-down. Keep up the good work, and thank you for the awareness you bring to the internet.

This is kinda terrifying, I mean anyone in the SEO world has at least thought about doing something like this, but who has the hatred to actually deploy such tactics. Thanks for the heads up, and as always, another great White Board Friday

Great WBF! I have been following this topic for the past two weeks, and as usual I agree with everything stated. I am not sure why Aaron Wall has an alternative perspective on this matter. However, I am sure he has good reasoning.

Rand, there was a post that you mentioned in Google + about the SEOmoz home page being spammed with the anchor text snuggie dog bed. I am not sure which of the catagories this falls into, or how this can influence a sites ranking. What was the deal with that?

They managed to get this site to rank for [snuggie dog bed] - which is, at least, humorous. It won't last very long, but it's humorous. Proving that spam can still affect rankings (not exactly news...) but forcing SEOMoz to start selling dog beds isn't exactly my idea of negative SEO.

This just proves that google's recent changes are appalling. Personally I consider their motives have nothing to do with cleaning up the serps, which are now much worse, and everything to do with making seo uncertain and driving ppc. The whole thing is now beyond a joke, and I wish people like you rand would come out and say so. People like me like and respect you but it's time for some industry leaders who google may take seriously to come off the fence.

What's an interesting test for you, experimenting with your own blog, is other people's livelihoods. Google have decimated so many people who are not black hat spammers, it's outrageous.

There is an inbuilt trap for all the highly respected experts whose reputations are right out there.

If they get on the wrong side of Google, they lose a lot more than I am losing from Google's "playin around". I don't see any profiled people saying anything that hints at the conspiracy paranoia you mention.

But when I see what Google has done to my sites and what has gone into replace them on the front page, I cannot believe the claims of giving-better-user-experience, better-content. How on earth do all those facebook pages get onto the front page when all they have is cut-n-paste Amazon copy?

My good pages from several sites have disappeared and my best ranking pages in several niches are contact us pages and pages that reprint Yahoo Answers and RSS feeds. My original content, 1500+ words - gone; not in the first 100 pages but pages that are excluded in sitemaps are ranking!

I've also had 3 bad hacker episodes plus 15 sites deleted from one server, yet GWT never once reported an issue, yet they manage to penalize so many of the sites they see in that one account?

I know big brands are mentioned a lot, but what about all the 'mom n pop' companies and sites? There are very good blogs, ecommerce stores, and other little sites that add value that will not have the same social signals as the big brands.

Wouldn't negative SEO crush these "mom and pop" sites?

In addition, does the 'big brand' tag allow more leeway and 'grey hat' activity? If you look at some of the profiles in the bigger niches, it seems that the 'brands' were not hit the same way in the rankings.

Next,In late March, I received a Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links for one of my sites.

This is a site where I hired SEO firms (not weird overseas ones) 6-8 years ago and then let them go and did our own SEO. However, We have NOT built any links to this site in over 3 years! We decided on testing a non link building approach for this site over 3 years ago.

So, I submitted a reconsideration request & I did receive a response in 4 days... (Yes, only 4 days) :)

FROM GOOGLE - We received a request from a site owner to reconsider "domainname.com" for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines.Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

Glad I received a response, however We have NOT built any links to this site in over 3 years! Rand mentioned devaluing links, I think we would all prefer devalue verses penality.

There are many profitable niches outside of travel, diet, insurance, etc. Aren't the little guys gonna be easy targets? Some don't use webmaster tools (or choose not to). And what about the local guys?

Gradually Google will stop trusting backlinks because of the automated softwares, you can give your competitors a bunch of nasty backlinks anytime. So it's better to stop trusting them. This is what i beleive. What do you say?

I liked this WBF a lot but it made me a little scared because I know my competitors all to well, and if they ever saw this post, it would alert them that these things are possible and I woudn't put it past them to try them. Most of them are gray and black hat already. Who would've thought the embroidery industry would be so cut-throat?

After penguin update Google results does not have relevant or fresh content. Looks like google has more spam results and networks sites results like servicemagic & superpages Take a look http://bit.ly/JKxs8n

Rand, I have a competitor that has a second directory on his domain with pharma links back to his home page. This site has continued to rank #1 for our industry keywords over the years even through the Google Algorithm changes. I have submitted to google but still no change. Do you have any suggestions. performance films tn dot com. If I do a search for performance films tn dot com / viagra these pages start to populate the search results. Thanks for your help.

For the Malware attack: It doesn't affect on ranking for almost a month - It affects traffic and leads only #alreadyexperiencedwithmany

Regarding negative links - I want to ask if a link created on a bad forum and tagged the "brand name / company name" and that link starts appearing on page 1 of Google for the "brand name" - How to remove that link? If contacting webmasters via email, via FB and twitter all doesn't work... Contacting Google doesn't help much. What is the best move?

Rand here i want to ask one question what do you think if i am targeting "Web Application Development Company" Keywords and i made two pages one for Developers realted keywords and one for Development Ralated Keywords, last week we were discussing on this topic but i forgot to ask this question... Will this make negative sign for Google ?

WOW Rand! Nice blast on Aaron Wall. I used to be a subscriber at Aaron Wall's SEOBOOK. I wouldn't worry about him not liking you. He's just like that. I was able to tell that is the way he is and will never change. He doesn't like you, he doesn't like Matt Cutts, he doesn't like anyone outside his $300/mo subscribers. He always speaks in the negative. He "is" good at what he does; I must give him that. But I came to SEOMoz from SEOBook because of your SEOMOZ webapp. I was much more valuable than SEOBook.

I think you may have mis-interpreted Rand's mention of Aaron. I don't think he's worried about Aaron not liking him, and he was simply stating that they disagree on the subject. Aaron is a super smart guy and as you said he's very good at what he does. Whether he likes people or not, doesn't really matter though, does it? I'm glad to hear you like the web app! We also have many members who pay for SEObook as well and think the service and forums are invaluable.

Waow I never knew SEO world have such devil minds within! I wonder where "they" could have reached and what they could have achieved out of this "Creativity" and "Hardwork" if it would have been used for their own progress in an authentic way, all I can say is, I feel pity for such people who actually work hard to get others in trouble rather than working for themselves.

Well leaving this aside, Awesomely comprehended post and Tremendous points Rand! I guess the real cause for all these link penalties and de-indexing thingy is that we have forgotten the main purpose of SEO that was "to optimize in order to give users a better experience" and search engines will ultimately bring you up. But now SEO is more about "manipulating search-engines to rank higher and get conversions". Google wants businesses to think about its users and it will reward your for this (IMO). Ofcourse authentic links and White hat SEO is just the trick for this purpose.

You have great post about Google panda update april 2012 latest, I have read all your view. I want ask you about something different google panda update, because Google focus on the purity of content, My site is ranking in top 10 pages in Search Engine google before panda update, but till now my sites keywords are going to some out of 1st page and many go to out of 100. Which is best techniques we should use according to Google panda update alogrithm although my site will be come back in ranking search engine.